Longing for those simpler days — of flip phones

Former president and CEO of Nokia Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo shows a new flip phone during a press conference at the World Mobile Congress, in Barcelona in February 2008.

Photo: MANU FERNANDEZ, AP

There’s an older man on my block who still uses a flip phone. I noticed it for the first time last year. It had been so long since I’d seen a flip phone in the wild that the sight almost gave me whiplash.

“Mr. Ortega!” I yelled (his hearing is not good). “That’s a very old phone you’ve got.”

“Is it?” he asked me. He was holding it in his hands, and he glanced at it and shrugged. “It still works.”

“You don’t want one that can do more, like a smartphone?” I asked.

He gave me a look. I know it well. It was an “I don’t have time for this foolishness” look. If I were his daughter, I’d have given him a similar look when he was originally resistant to getting a cell phone in the first place. (My hunch is that Mr. Ortega didn’t want to carry a cell phone at all, but his family members decided he needed to.)

I shook my head and moved on, feeling sorry for him. Poor Mr. Ortega, I thought, he doesn’t know what he’s missing.

My step grew bouncier as I contemplated all of the things my smartphone could do that a flip phone could not: mapping apps, photography, hailing a Lyft ride. I racked my brain for what life was like when we all used flip phones. It was only about a decade ago, but I could barely remember it.

Life seemed to be much slower back then, I thought. There had been fewer electric cords.

Fast forward to last week. I watched Apple’s iPhone 7 announcement. The new iPhone will start at $649. The big “improvement” is that Apple’s decided to get rid of the headphone jack. Instead, customers will be expected to drop an additional $159 on a set of wireless earbuds named AirPods. It’ll cost extra money now, too, to charge the phone while simultaneously listening to music, because now you’ll have to buy either a $35 adapter or a $49 charging dock.

No sooner had this news dropped than enterprising souls posted photos online of how to use the new iPhone with regular headphones. I squinted at them. This once-basic operation will now require three cords and multiple adapters.

I glanced at my own iPhone 5s. Already I’ve had to buy three new chargers for this one phone, because chargers, frankly, are one of Apple’s weak product links. They fray and tear, and it’s easy to damage them. Especially when you’re charging your phone more than once per day, as I and every other smartphone user I know must do.

Unsettled, I tabled the idea of a new iPhone and clicked over to a local news site. The headlines were about the newest smartphones exploding or catching fire.

“Samsung Recalls Galaxy Note 7 After Battery Explosions,” read a headline on the local CBS site. The story was about how Samsung Electronics is recalling all of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones two weeks after the product launch, after the company confirmed 35 instances of the phones catching fire or exploding. The problem was apparently in the battery cell; a spokesperson in the story blamed “a tiny problem in the manufacturing process.”

Examples of the “tiny problem” in the CBS story and other stories (I kept clicking, what?) included a man whose Jeep burst into flames after he left the smartphone charging inside, a woman whose bedroom filled with smoke and chemicals after she activated her phone, and a man who had a fire in his garage after he tried to charge his phone there. The Federal Aviation Administration warned the public not to operate or charge the phones in airliner passenger cabins.

At this point, I decided to step away from the computer and go home. Everyone on the bus was hypnotized by their smartphone, but mine was losing juice. I glanced to see if anyone had a Galaxy Note 7 that might turn the bus into an inferno — not that day — and then I spent the trip staring out of the window. I got off the bus in this contemplative state. Maybe that’s why I was able to look differently at Mr. Ortega, who at that moment was walking by.

“You still have your flip phone?” I asked him.

“It still works,” he said. “Why, you need it?”

“I might, my battery’s almost dead.”

He laughed. “Those new phones, you have to charge them all the time,” he said. “I’ve been using this thing for three days now, no charging.” He pulled out his phone and showed me. The battery icon was half full.

The glory of the flip phone hit me with full force.

“You’re wiser than all of us,” I told him.

Mr. Ortega sniffed. “I didn’t get to be this old for nothing,” he said.

Caille Millner is an editorial writer and Datebook columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. She has worked at the paper since 2006. On the editorial board, she covers a wide range of topics including business, finance, technology, education and local politics. For Datebook, she writes a weekly column on culture.She is the recipient of the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s Walker Stone Award in Editorial Writing and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Editorial Writing Award.